First, let’s review playlist groups. In the Spotify desktop program, head to File > New Playlist Folder or use the shortcut Control + Shift + N to make a new group. These allow you to put any number of playlists into a single group; greatly cutting down on the noise in one step.

Try putting all of your offline playlists into one folder – then you don’t have to worry about playlists you only use on your phone when you’re on your desktop.

Even after you’ve done this, there’s more you can do to tame your collection of playlists. With Spotify’s new “Your Music” feature, you can bring your favorite albums and songs together and completely forget playlists when listening to a single artist or album.

To use “Your Music”, look for the plus icon when listening to anything on Spotify. Clicking this adds the current album or song to Your Music for later use. The “Save” button is equivalent.

“Your Music” can then be selectively listened to, whether online or offline (if you have Premium). Only like certain songs by Johnny Cash? Cherry-pick your favorites, then sync the Cash section of Your Music to your phone. No more album playlists!

Finally, here’s a super-secret playlist tip: if you make a new playlist and name it “-” (without the quotes), it will become a divider. Super handy for even more organization!

Do you really want all of your friends to see every track you listen to? All of the social features are enabled by default, but it’s easy to turn Spotify into a quiet, personal service. Let’s take a look.

First, you’ll want to dive into Preferences, located under Edit > Preferences on Spotify’s desktop program, or use the Control + P shortcut. Here, you’ll find a number of social features.

If you only want to shut off Facebook and Spotify sharing at certain times, you can use a private session. Just click your name in the top-right section of the desktop client to enable a Private Session, which lasts for six hours. This will have the same effect as turning off the sharing boxes, only temporarily.

And if you’re only using Spotify on mobile, you can access your sharing settings though the Preferences menu in the same way.

For maximum privacy, you can quickly check if your playlists are visible to only you. Just right-click any playlist, and if you see an option to “Make Public,” then it’s not shared. If it’s currently public, you’ll have the option to “Make Secret.”

Head to the App Finder in Spotify’s sidebar; from there you’ll have access to plenty of free apps that enhance Spotify.

The one you’ll want to use for real-time lyrics is TuneWiki. At the time of writing, it’s the #1 app in the top charts.

Once you choose the app, you’ll immediately see lyrics to whatever you’re listening to. A bar across the top will allow you to add TuneWiki to your favorites; click this to stick it in the sidebar right below the App Finder.

It works well right out of the box, but if you’d like, you can customize the text and background to your liking. Just click the gear icon in the top-right corner, near the social buttons. You can change the lyrics’ text size and color, the size of the current line, and the spacing between lines.

Now, whenever you have a song playing in Spotify, you can pull up its lyrics with one click and have them follow along with the song. It might not seem like much, but it will save you a lot of time if you often look up lyrics. Plus, if you leave it open during a song change, it will start displaying lyrics for the new song.

If you’re feeling especially adventurous, try clicking the “Get Creative With Lyric Art” button near the bottom. This will let you set a photo background and change the font of the lyrics – great if the original app looks a little bland to you.

But you can use operators to refine searches and get exactly what you want. You can try searching by year or genre (and even combine these), such as “year:1998-2001 genre:pop.” If you’d like to find a specific user on Spotify, search terms can help you there, too. Type “spotify:user:Ludacris” to go to that user page.

Note that if you signed up for Spotify using Facebook, your username is likely a random string of numbers, which is clunky to search for. If you’d like to find your username, just click your name in the top-right (the same place you click to start a Private Session) and click “Account.” A webpage will launch with your account info, including your username numbers.

Another way you can search that you might not have known is to use Control + F to filter your playlists. Once you press the command, a small bar pops up in the top-right corner of the playlist.

From here, you can type anything and it will filter your playlist in real-time. It allows for the artist, song title, or album.

You can even make a filter of your current playlist, so if you have a big playlist of songs and type “the” in the filter, Spotify will play only songs in that playlist that contain “the” until you change the playlist. The only drawback is that you can’t then use Control + F on artist or album pages, but Spotify has explained why.

Thanks Ben. As you say, year is often wrong - reissue, re-mastering etc. The biography is OK, but why do they not have the album notes with personnel, recording studio and so on. I keep having to refer to discog and others.Maybe they could merge in an ideal world. Not a big deal, jus wonderin.

That would be neat if they expanded their info on artists. I guess that assume most people won't check it out, so they leave it off. Maybe this could be added to Spotify in a future update! You could put a request in on their forums.

Who are you to have such a wonderfully diverse interest including RED (rocks), 12 Stones (miss 'em), Disciple (seen 'em), and Guardian (awesome drum solo with whiffle bats)? I just filled out a Google Play playlist without any of them, but now I've got work to do. Thank you Ben!

I have premium spotify and can access it from my pc,tablet and phone. Everything is good with pc however in my tablet and phone not so much. Every time I open the app on my phone or/tablet there's a whole lot of playlists added on the "recently played" area even though I have not played some of those songs/artist. I get them off my activity and when I open the app again... surprise they're there again!! It's annoying specially because they're ALOT 25+ playlist. Hoe can I get them out for good.
This does not happen on my pc, only on my tablet and cell phone
Thx!

Just noticed you missed out a search operator that I use a lot and isn't included on the link you posted for the complete list of search terms. Ignoring the square brackets [], it's the [label:"search term"] operator, allowing you to search only for items signed to a particular label. I use it all the time and it's really great for discovering new artists and ones that are similar to those you might already like, especially if the label is independent.

An example search might be [label:"ghostly international"], and there's no need for the quotes if your search term is only one word.

None of the options when you click on Preferences are there any more. I can't get Tunespeak to acknowledge my Spotify or Facebook either. It DOES NOT give you the option to "Share my activity and what I listen to on Facebook" so I'm totally boned on how to get these to link up because those are the directions given on the damned application.

Yeah, unfortunately this article is almost a year old and Spotify's most recent (lousy) update changed a lot of these settings. You can still activate a Private Session, though, so that should keep you from sharing when you want to be private.

I never used TuneSpeak; perhaps ask over at MUO Answers for some help?

Yeah. It took two days of turning the option on then it finally recognized Facebook. Once it did this Tunespeak recognized it as well. So, just have to wait what feels like an eternity before it connects.

Playlist separators don't work anymore either, and Apps have been eliminated as well. Spotify is fully following the trend of "streamlining" applications by removing any and all functionality, and leaving only a few one-button actions that even the most stupid can understand =( I fully expect the search operators to go next. In the meantime, they *still* haven't implemented playlist folders on the web player, and sharing has been broken in various ways and places for years. This amount of not caring about users is mind-boggling, I guess Spotify is darn lucky that there is no reasonable competitor around, otherwise my Premium would have been gone long ago.

Thanks for the article.
I am a relatively new user, and have encountered a problem that seems out of the ordinary. I created several playlists; I made one of them Public. If I send a link of the public / shared one to someone, they can see it, play it, and Follow it. However, it does not show up in Search. It has a fairly unique name, and when the name is typed exactly in Search, the results come back as "No match." What's up with that? Could there be some sort of a one week or so delay in getting new playlists into the Search database?
Thanks for you insights!

Jeff, I don't know exactly how Spotify's playlists work, but if you've made the list public and your profile isn't private, you should be able to find it. I would wait a week or two and then try it again. If you can use the link to access it correctly, the playlist uploaded as it should and I'd wager it just takes time to be indexed.

Is there a way to play ONLY the songs on a playlist? When I make a playlist and try to play its songs, it plays one song from that list and then a random song (from the same artist) comes up (as if it turns the playlist into a radio of that artist or such). This only happens with a playlist I myself create. When I added/imported a playlist from a friend's shared Spotify link, the playlist worked fine, playing ONLY the songs listed. I thought it might be because I'm using the free Spotify version and not the premium, but my friend uses the free version as well. So, I'm a bit confused. Let's say my playlist has 10 songs - I just want to be able to play only those 10 songs. Is it possible at all in the free version? Thanks for your help.

I'm honestly puzzled by what you're seeing. When you select a song in a playlist, it should play music from just that list. I would suggest posting on Spotify's forums or re-installing the desktop app, because I haven't heard of this problem before.

When you check the play queue, is the song you selected the "now playing" track? The others in the playlist should follow it to complete the queue.

I have been using Spotify for years and have always created my Playlists by Artist - adding all albums by one artist into a playlist named the artist. With the newer versions, this doesn't seem like the new view of Albums/Artists/Songs necessarily bring the albums I have already identified into the new view. any advice how to do a mass add so I don't need to go to each playlist? I think it has to do with the old Star method, as well as whether they were saved or not. Any advice?

I'm not totally sure what you're asking here, but I know that the latest update to Spotify really screwed a lot of things up.

It sounds like that you're trying to do is make "My Music" show all the albums you've added to any playlist. There really isn't a way to do this besides manually saving each album to your music. It shouldn't be too hard - just go into each playlist you want to save, CTRL + A to select all, and then right-click and save to your music. That will get it into your collection and you can get rid of or stop using the playlists after that.

I have a playlist for a first grade play I'm doing with snippets of songs (about 30 seconds each) but now when I play those songs, not from the playlist, they only play the 30 seconds. How can I fix this?

I found really good use of the divider and the folders. After my friend complained I only had one giant playlist, I started separating my artists into playlists, which was nice for others to find what I listen to, but a bit annoying for me to see all those playlists. Now, I got one playlists, a playlist folder and a divider in between. Thanks a lot.

It is appearing in my playlists without adding it to one. I always react to it because it
mostly appears in my "Rock"-list, and it doesn't quite fit in to say the least...
I may be able to take a screenshot sometime for you if you need it, but as of right now
i'm an not on a device that i can log in to Spotify on.

Thank you for these tips, my lists looks much cleaner now :)
I have a question; I keep getting a song (ABBA-dancing queen haha) randomly in my lists, sometimes multiple times in each list... And know that i've put the playlists in folders like you showed me, i can only see the songs when i'm in the big folder, and when i go to erase them in my playlists they are nowhere to be seen... Thus i can not take away intruding ABBA :(
Any help?

Unfortunately, playlist folders are *still* not implemented in the web player. People have been asking for that ever since the web client went public, as it becomes very tedious as soon as you have a few playlists. I don't get why they keep ignoring such an essential and assumingly simple to implement feature. But Spotify have a track record of working hard on all the stuff people don't want, and taking years to acknowledge the simplest, most obvious, most widely requested bugfixes. I have hundreds of playlists in about a dozen folders, and loading the list of playlists in the web player takes about a minute, if it decides to work at all.

Thanks for the tip on the dividers, I didn't know about that one! And search options definitely need to be made more widely known, lest Spotify will start disregarding power user features like these if they think people don't use them. It's a trend among tech companies to do that, everything is simplified down to a complete lack of functionality.

For free spotify. When will I get a free next button.. I've been listening for almost 10 songs, then I try to hit the next button and it works. I was just wondering if it add me some next button when I listen to a song or two from start to end?

I apologize for not including these. Tim's article, linked to at the end of this one, detailed them a bit more than I did. But you can check this page for a complete list of these commands. Thanks for commenting and happy searching!

Hi Ben,
I used to be able to hover my cursor over the minimized Spotify icon in my task bar and it would show the artist and song currently playing in the player. Now all it shows is "Spotify Premium". Do you know how I can get that feature back? Thanks.

A full-time writer, Ben is at his happiest when he's working with technology and able to help others. He loves discussing and playing video games, and hosted his own podcast in years past. Feel free to contact him on social media!